Unofficial news and tips about Google

July 23, 2009

Google Helps You Understand Recursion

Google uses the "did you mean" feature, which normally corrects misspellings, to illustrate a nerdy joke: defining the word "recursion" using "see recursion" and pointing to the same definition.

"A recursive process is one in which objects are defined in terms of other objects of the same type. Using some sort of recurrence relation, the entire class of objects can then be built up from a few initial values and a small number of rules," explains MathWorld.

yeah great feature :-Di tried to do that on wikipedia but it didn't let me link to the article itself. ;-)

is there any good collection for all (search based) google eastereggs? like "answer to life, the universe and everyting" or "how many horns on a unicorn"... anyhow, the good old "we can not find chuck norris, he finds YOU" doesn't work anymore :-(

That's funny! In fact, I'd have to say that's funny as a shirt I once saw that said, "The Department of Redundancy Department."I love how Google comes up with stuff just for the fun of it. I think it's great!

The problem is that is working only every other hour of the day. Regardless of the browser. Just by chance people have been trying it either the wrong hours or the right ones and thinking it is the browser.

In a recursive definition, something is not defined *exactly* in terms of itself, but something slightly different (such as defining the solution to a problem in terms of the solution(s) of smaller instances of the same kind of problem). In Google's case, 'recursive' is not defined recursively, but circularly ... *exactly* in terms of itself. This is not the right definition, and could be confusing. Brownie points for a clever idea, though :-).